When Harry Should Avoid Meeting Sally

A philosopher I know told me that once, when he was explaining his views on a contested matter to a group of his peers, he was met with this objection: “But that sounds like Stanley Fish.” I would bet that no one else in the room had ever met me and that few if any had ever read me. It is just that for many in his corner of the discipline, “Stanley Fish” is a placeholder for ideas you don’t want to be associated with. Saying of someone that he sounds like Stanley Fish is a quick and easy way of refuting him. You might say that it takes the place of an argument or, perhaps, that it is an argument all by itself and one that can be conveniently made in shorthand. (It’s not quite ad hominem; it’s ad hominem backed up by reasons that don’t even have to be given.)

I didn’t resent the anecdote at all. I took it as a compliment. After all, you don’t get to be the poster boy for obvious error everyday. It takes work and some measure of prominence. I of course have my own Stanley Fishes, figures whose writings and thought I consider to be so wrongheaded that when someone I encounter seems to be echoing them or approving them or even being nice to them, I dismiss out of hand what I’m hearing or reading.
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas is a luminary who occupies such a place in my anti-pantheon. I have been throwing verbal brickbats at Habermas for years (I once even called for him to be prevented from writing anymore; I didn’t specify the means), poking academic fun at his slogans (like “ideal speech situation” and “universal pragmatics”) and trumpeting the emptiness of his program to anyone who would listen.

This means that Habermas (along with a few others I will not name) is very important to me. I feel that I couldn’t get along without him. I need him to be there. If he were taken away from me, I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d have to find someone else to be the object of my unreflective scorn. And that would prove difficult, given that Habermas, or anyone else who might fill this slot, has very particular views (the ones I love to hate), and installing a disciple or a simulacrum in his place would not really be satisfying.

But how could Habermas ever be taken away from me? Even if he were no longer publishing, I could always have recourse to his previous writings whenever I needed to signal a negative judgment; I could still say (dismissively), “sounds like Habermas” and leave it at that. So no matter what he does or doesn’t do, he’s still mine. The only thing that might take him away from me is meeting him, something I was threatened with a few years ago in Chicago, but something I avoided like the plague.

Why? Because were I ever to meet him, the odds are that I would like him (the public record suggests that he is an admirable fellow) and if I liked him it would be hard for me to continue beating up on him. (Despite the proverb, familiarity does not breed contempt.) In fact I would immediately regret, and want to take back, all the nasty things I had said with such zest.

Indeed, this has happened to me several times. I got to know long-time personal piñatas and found that they were — can you believe it? — human beings, often perfectly nice human beings with perfectly nice families. Even worse, the first words out of their mouths were sometimes, “I admire your work” — and once an author hears that, his estimation of the person voicing this pleasing judgment immediately rises. (She thinks I’m good, therefore she must be good.)

At that moment your inventory of ready-made-always-available-in-a-pinch targets would be diminished by one, and since the list is never really that long, the loss of one would be serious. Of course, it might be the case that the person you have learned to dislike in print is even more dislikable in the flesh (oh happy day!), but you can’t count on that and so it is better, all things considered, not to take any chances. (The reverse story, where in-the-flesh dislike proves no match for epistolary affection, has been told in a play and in the three movies and one stage musical it has spawned — “The Shop Around the Corner,” 1940; “In the Good Old Summertime,” 1949; “She Loves Me,” 1963; and “You’ve Got Mail,” 1998.)

The psychology I am describing is not limited to the academic world. There may be a politician who embodies every idea and policy you detest and fear. There may be a distant family member whose (no doubt) unmerited success gives you a receptacle for your resentment and envy. There may be an athlete who is your example of everything that is wrong with the modern world. These are valuable people and you want to hold on to them.

So whoever are the characters filling out your precious roster of perfect villains and nogoodniks, take care not to meet them. And if one of your antiheroes happens to turn up in a coffee shop you’re sitting in, get up and leave immediately.

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Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami. In the Fall of 2012, he will be Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of 15 books, most recently “Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others”; “How to Write a Sentence”; “Save the World On Your Own Time”; and “The Fugitive in Flight,” a study of the 1960s TV drama. “Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution” will be published in 2014.